


Some Dreaming State

by Ainikki



Category: Dororo (Anime 2019)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, But Mostly Hurt, Emotional Maturity, Found Families, Gen, Heavy Angst, Lucid Dreaming, Moriko Song aftermath, bends canon a little with speaking proficiency, hopeful dreams, hurt-comfort, tragic flashbacks, who are we kidding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-05-31 12:37:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19426144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ainikki/pseuds/Ainikki
Summary: Set post-episode 6 (Moriko Song). Hyakkimaru has trouble coping with the deaths of Mio and the orphans. Dororo tries to help, and uncovers some unresolved grief herself.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I had a plot bunny for Hyakkimaru carrying Dororo and learning how to read from Jukai, and from those innocuous seeds this angst monster was born. Episode 6 kind of destroyed me inside and this, oddly, made me feel a little better.
> 
> Title comes from "Blinding" by "Florence + The Machine," but this is not a songfic.
> 
> Seems that I have been held in some dreaming state  
> A tourist in the waking world, never quite awake  
> No kiss, no gentle word could wake me from this slumber  
> Until I realized that it was you who held me under

After the temple fire, Hyakkimaru does not sleep at all for three days.

He stops moving when Dororo collapses, builds a fire, waits for her slow-moving white flame to rouse for something to eat and more marching. Stays up all night shaking, pulled tight as a cord internally, feeling about to snap, always about to snap.

He doesn't know where he is going, but he knows he needs to get away.

On the third day, somewhere near sunset, Dororo stumbles and falls near him. Unthinkingly, he picks her up and puts her arms across his shoulders, wraps her legs around his torso and keeps walking.

"Give it a rest, aniki," Dororo says with a huge yawn. She curls her fingers into his shoulders. "I think you should cry."

"Cry?"

"Yeah." She yawns again. "Let all the feelings just—come out. Scream. Cry. Then sleep." She settles her head between his neck and shoulder; he feels her breathing in and out, shallow at first, then deeper.

This is not the first time he has carried her, but it is the first time he's found it comforting. In some ways, she reminds him of his father: a warm and constant presence, a reminder that what is around him is real and important and not made up solely of demons and threats.

He thinks he's cried before, at the temple, and when his injuries smarted against a sudden gust of cold air: something wet and cold behind the empty sockets where his eyes should be. He doesn't understand why Dororo thinks it would help.

Hyakkimaru walks until dawn, the plants emerging to his sight out of their sleepy dull green as light enlivens them, and Hyakkimaru sets Dororo down gently, taking out berries that he'd gathered during the night for their breakfast.

He might need to hunt today. He's looking forward to it. Since leaving the temple, killing has a certain relish to it that he'd never previously experienced. He's a little frightened of it, because Dororo seems to be, but that doesn't keep him from chasing more of the feeling.

When he sets Dororo down, she awakens, and grumpily helps him build a fire. There's a river nearby. They can fish. It's not as fun for him as hunting, but, she argues, it's faster.

Dororo inhales her share of food like she's starving, then heads for the river without waiting for him, expecting him to follow. He does, but he doesn't understand it. He should let Dororo run—go. Before Daigo's soldiers find her and do worse to her than the others. If worse is possible.

He's beginning to think _worse_ is always possible.

"Yo, aniki? You coming?"

His restored leg twitches for a moment, as if remembering its recent dismemberment. He doesn't want to move, but he can't be alone right now. "I'll come."

He walks to the river, stones underfoot warming as the sun comes up. Fish are teeming, eating from the line of silt under his toes, and he catches two before the others realize it, white lights flashing out like the embers of a fire. He spears two more on his arms before Dororo calls him out of the stream, and he halts on the edge of the bank, thinking that he isn’t hungry.

He wants to keep walking. He hasn't walked far enough. His legs are about to collapse and something sharp is poking the inside of his head but he can't stop. He hasn't outrun the problem yet. But he can't understand the problem, so how can he outrun it?

"Aniki!"

Dororo stuns him back into the present moment. "Dororo," he stumbles out, "Teach me. I don't understand."

"Teach you what?"

"Cry."

"How to cry?" She's tilting her head, a sure sign of confusion. "I—you—I dunno. You just feel really, _really_ sad, and it all just kind of—comes out."

She wades out of the river, and he follows, bringing the fish. Dororo spits them silently while he stands over her with his legs shaking and a white-hot pain shooting up from his feet to his head. There is something wrong with him. He needs to kill something—not fish: a demon, a bear—

Dororo sighs. "You should sit."

"Can't." Not strictly true, but that's what it feels like. He thinks that if he stops for too long it will all catch up to him, and the fire will consume him this time. That doesn't bother him so much, but the idea that it will catch up to Dororo faster without him sends his mind blank with rage.

It isn't fair.

That's not a new thought.

He remembers the first child that his father had given into his false arms when he'd been six or seven years old; the child's legs had been crushed, and a cut to the eyes had made him blind. His father had used their tapping and signs to communicate that the child was like Hyakkimaru—helpless; in need of care. That child's mother had died of an infection in her stomach, and the child itself, lacking teeth, had starved despite all they had tried to do for her.

Other unfortunate people followed, a long string of them, and gradually Hyakkimaru had begun to understand that this happens because of _war_ —a concept so terrible that his father would never teach him what it was, even when he'd asked, with letters in the sand.

His father's terrible pain and guilt and sorrow had been overwhelming to him, sometimes, and he had not understood it; but he understands this: though people had frequently come in missing an arm, or a leg, or maybe both, no one had ever been missing as much as he had. 

When his leg had grown back after his desperate fight against the kamataichi, he had understood _war_ completely, like puzzle pieces slotting into place: war is a risk of loss. No one risks losing so much unless there's something vital to gain. Until he was ten or so, Hyakkimaru had been half-convinced that everyone around him had already killed the demons that had stolen their bodies, and only he still had his long quest to complete.

His father had scoffed at this idea, of course. Dororo probably would, too. Most people are born whole, but in his experience, they don't usually end that way. Even if he could restore everything—fix it all—it would all be taken again in the end. 

Life, by design, is unfair.

Dororo is pulling his hand down, and he plops next to the fire, a tangle of manufactured limbs. He feels the heat of the fire, and sweat makes his injuries chafe, and itch. He doesn't scratch; his fingers aren't good for it, too rough on his new skin, and he's not going to ask Dororo even though she would scratch them.

"I think you should talk about it," she says after a moment.

"About what?"

"Mio. Take. The orphans. You liked them."

"Yes."

"You miss them."

"Yes."

"So tell me."

He believes that he _did_ just tell her. He sets his false palms flat on the ground and thinks about what's bothering him, because that's what Dororo had told him to do, and doesn't feel better.

When he thinks about it, he realizes that he doesn't know the kanji for her name.

When his father had realized that Hyakkimaru could interpret dead matter like dust and dirt in a way similar to what he and Dororo call "vision," he had taught Hyakkimaru the basic signs, and many kanji; so many, that they blur together when he thinks about the time it took to learn them. His father had known so many because he had been a doctor—that is what he had conveyed, through symbols and experience, though he had never shared his own name.

He writes his own name in the earth beneath his hands, slow strokes over the demon kanji, languorous swoops for the kanji for boys' names. He points to Dororo. "What's your name?"

"In letters? I don't know letters."

Of course. His father had told him to seek help at temples, if possible, because most ordinary people don't know how to read. "I—don't know her name."

"Mio?" Dororo guesses. "I don't, either."

"It bothers me."

Dororo pauses for a long time. "What happened to them wasn't right," she says. "I think you're upset because you're trying to find a way to—remember them. Like they were. Like that could bring them back, like your voice or your leg or your skin. But you know, they don't come back. Once they go—there--they never come back."

Hyakkimaru nods slow understanding. "Where is 'there'?"

"No one really knows that, either," Dororo says. "Some of the priests claim to, but kachan always said they were liars. No one's ever come back, so no one on this side knows."

"So they do—go somewhere?" This is a difficult concept for Hyakkimaru to grasp; he is not used to making assumptions about an afterlife. If he'd allowed himself to think about it at all—and he hadn't, really—he would have assumed that dead things lost their color and it never returned, simple as that. They'd never gone anywhere that he'd noticed.

"I don't know. Maybe." She plops out on her back, arms extended; it must be a warm day. He's not used to extremes of temperature yet and can't tell much about the weather, aside from "wet" or "dry," without observing her. She has taught him so much about himself through unfiltered ordinary human experience; he probably trusts her more than he should.

Not enough to tell her that he knows her secret. Not yet. That'll come out when it has to. They're both running scared of the past, for their own reasons, and kids need to look out for each other, after all.

He huffs frustration. "I can't cry. This is irritating."

"I don't think you can force it," Dororo says. "It just—happens. You're overwhelmed, and it happens."

"Overwhelmed?"

"Yeah," she says. "It means you just can't take it anymore."


	2. Ghosts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the "dream" part of "Some Dreaming State." There is so much angst, you guys. *hugs* for everyone, including Hyakkimaru. If he ever meets me in person I am 110% okay with him sword-arming me for putting him through this.

After breakfast, Dororo sleeps the sleep of the dead, unmoving and not even snoring, so exhausted that Hyakkimaru can't even budge her to get on his back so he can keep walking.

He doesn't know the kanji for her name, so he writes Mio in the alphabet for foreign letters, over and over, erasing then drawing. Dororo usually snores and the forest sounds seem louder without that noise underneath to steady him.

Because he needs something to do and the work feels familiar, he gets up, takes fifty paces from the fire, and finds a long, thick stick. While standing, he whittles a stave without realizing that he intends to dig a grave. When he starts digging, it feels natural, like he's home—like his father is behind him and will help him carry the bodies into the hole, when he's done. Like he's lived through another epidemic that seemed to kill everyone except him, without knowing why.

He falls asleep on his feet with the stave in his hand.

***

When he wakes up it's morning, and he's horizontal; there's a blanket over him that feels familiar against his exposed skin. In fact, everything, including the floor he's sleeping on, is familiar: he's at home. The air is heavy with remembered undercurrents that indicate someone is cooking something; the windows are open to the air, letting in warm sun; tendrils of the live herbs his father cultivates spill over the windowsill.

He breathes deeply and doesn't move until someone kicks him in the foot to rouse him, and when he turns to face the figure of his father, the white light he sees is not the one he expects.

It's Dororo. Well, that makes sense, doesn't it? She's been traveling with him all this time, it makes sense she'd come home with him—

\--does it? How had they gotten here? He doesn't remember. He feels a bone-deep exhaustion settle over him, encouraging him to be still and not think about it. When Dororo kicks him again, he sits up and accepts the bowl of rice she offers, responding to her questions about how he slept and are his legs still bothering him in a perfunctory way.

When his father joins them a short time later, he sucks in a breath. New food and rest had restored part of his mental clarity; the question of how he'd gotten here becomes more urgent. Before he can ask anything, his father pulls him into a hug so tight his ribs compress, forehead leaning against his, breathing the same air. He returns the hug as best he can, allowing the comfort to wash over him because he needs this, needs it even if it makes no sense.

His father puts another full bowl of rice in his hands, and Dororo gives him her extras—Dororo, full?—when two other small lights enter the room: Takeo and Hanako, from the temple. The temple that had burned.

Impossible. They are dead.

The thought sends an eerie sense of calm across his nerves. If he is cohabiting with the dead, he must be dead himself. Far from being afraid of this outcome, he welcomes it: an end to pain, to the journey, to others dying because of him; if Dororo is already here with him, the worst has already happened to her, too. Perhaps they'd died when he'd fallen asleep—murdered by a samurai testing his new weapon on children.

It explains everything. He remembers falling asleep. This feels like an afterlife.

But he isn't sure and needs to think, so he offers to go to the river for water for his father's morning tea. His father hands him two empty buckets and asks for bathwater as well; one of the patients has oozing sores and needs to be bathed in bed, and Dororo makes a noise of disgust that almost makes him laugh.

Sound is so confusing. It reveals so much. Not as much as touch, which had been overwhelming and impossible to turn off, but…it hurts more than touch. He understands pain better after screaming with sound than he ever had before. While he is amused by Dororo's yuck-yuck noises, he wishes he'd never had to hear her scream to be saved from the monsters that dog his heels.

He hears the gurgling of the familiar stream by his home and stops dead in his tracks.

"Akai hana tsunde..." Sung words come to him clearly, distinct through the trees: "Ano hito ni ageyo."

He loses track of the words and gets lost in the sound. He has never forgotten that sound; will never forget it; it is the first thing he'd ever heard that he'd wanted to hear more of, and standing here, he feels like he could listen to that voice and that song forever.

He's definitely dead. There's no other explanation.

Hyakkimaru feels something wet behind his eyes, but he is not sad at all.

***

He wakes up still on his feet with Dororo slapping him, shaking him until he half-falls into the hole he's dug.

"Huh?" He grunts and sits up, Dororo's head directly across from his.

"You were sleepwalking," she says. "Talking. I thought you were in trouble, so I woke you."

Trouble? He puts a hand to his face and experiences a faint sensation of _wet_. He is crying, but he is not sad, not really. Disappointed, maybe? Frustrated?

Dororo gives him a curious expression. "I see you got around to crying," she says. "I'm glad. Do you feel better?"

He doesn't. The relief he'd felt at believing himself dead had vanished as soon as he'd realized he was awake, alive, and that the world hadn't changed. Wouldn't change.

He wants to return to that other world.

"I'm not," he says, searching for the right way to say it, "not unhappy. Right now."

"It can happen when you're happy, too," she says. "Crying."

He nods in understanding. Dororo had been right. Crying seems to have helped tremendously, in the sense that it had shown him something he'd wanted to see.

***

The next night puts him at the river again near dawn, as if no time has passed, none, and he forces his frozen feet into motion to follow the song, knowing who he'll find, knowing none of it is real, feeling that that doesn't matter very much.

Mio is standing in the water, near the place where he knows the rocks form a path to the opposite shore, and the stoop of her shoulders tells him that she is also carrying water. She must have gotten up before the rest of the house. Knowing her, she's probably been a great help with his father's patients; a better help than he'd ever been, with his clumsy hands and underdeveloped sense of empathy.

She is so _bright_ and _real_ to him that he starts crying again involuntarily, and he watches her leave the river and set the buckets down, approach so fast he doesn't have time to prepare for it.

"Hyakkimaru?" she asks softly, out of breath. "Are you all right?"

It takes everything he has not to yank her bodily forward and never let go. Instead he lets out a slow breath and fills his buckets up in two long pulls, then attaches her full buckets to the pole slung across his back. She tries to help, take at least one, but he pushes her hands down, away.

She asks again: "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

They both know it's a lie.

***

Hyakkimaru starts taking regular halts for meals and rest during the day again, and Dororo becomes livelier for it, convinced that crying, ultimately, did the trick.

"I knew you'd feel better if you got it out," she says sagely, and he nods absently but knows it's not honest. There's something he's still missing about crying, because, while he feels better temporarily after doing it—or seems to—the dreams leave a dull ache like someone's cutting open his chest bit by bloody bit. Like eventually his heart's going to fall right out, and he'll keel over, dead.

He's—it's inexpressible. He can't take it, but the feeling's hold on him is growing stronger, not weaker. He doesn't know how to explain this to Dororo without sounding weak to himself, so he says nothing. It is usually easier to say nothing, anyway, and let Dororo's light chatter dull the edges of his harsher memories.

He wants to remember them, though. All the people he's lost. Forgetting them feels like the wrong thing to do.

***

In his dreams it is always high summer. He, Dororo, Takeo and Mio are always planting rice and digging trenches for irrigation and flood control, fleeing sudden downpours of torrential rain, treating patients and animals with his dad. A hodgepodge of real experiences always invades this strange fantastical life, so much so that he can't always tell his manufactured world from his real memories immediately upon waking. It is only because the real world is so sharply different that he knows, and when his stomach drops out upon waking up, it feels like being stabbed.

His dream world in daytime is idyllic and sweet and warm; it makes him feel like he's found a place to belong. The nighttime dreams are better—worse.

Until he'd started dreaming about a better life, he'd had no idea just how much he'd wanted one, or for how long.

Jukai's house is tiny, so no one gets a room to themselves unless they're severely ill or injured. And so he usually finds himself with Dororo clinging to his back while Mio turns toward him and sings lullabies, tells stories to send them all off to sleep. Sometimes, she will touch his face and it will burn hot; sometimes, she'll wrap him and Dororo in a full hug before turning her back and resting on her own futon, and he'll fall asleep in a dream listening to Dororo's heartbeat and Mio's gentle breathing.

It is perfect.

It is torment.


	3. Memento Mori

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hyakkimaru tries to get better footing in the real world.

The dreams last for three weeks before he breaks down and tells Dororo about them, everything, in a rush of words that is probably incoherent. Dororo listens to him as he runs out of breath, breaks down, gets down on his knees and grabs the ground, seeking foundation in this real world that he hates. He might be crying, but if he is he doesn't realize it, because this is what true overwhelm feels like: there's just so much there that there's nowhere else for it to go.

When he's gotten it out, all of it, he feels Dororo's presence at his shoulder; she drapes one arm across his neck and tilts his face up with the other hand, making him focus on her, making him feel that she's there. "Dreams are like death, aniki," she says. "No one can live there."

He knows that. He gulps back more tears—how can it be overwhelming again when he'd just gotten everything out?—and asks, "How do I make them stop?"

She sighs. "Do you—want them to stop?"

And that's the problem, isn't it? To a limited extent, he can control his dreams—definitely more than he can control his real life. Given enough imagination and time, he might be able to generate a fantasy where he was whole and well, along with everyone he'd ever loved.

Love is the problem, and he finds it irksome. There are times when he wishes he could discard it, but even the idle wish makes him feel hollow and empty. It is something he needs.

Dororo is still hugging him. He returns the clasp, briefly, then gets up and starts packing up their meager camp. They haven't traveled at night for three weeks now, and he wants a bit of distance from his dreams.

***

When they stop, Dororo offers to help him build a cairn for their lost friends. "I never got to bury kachan," she says, "and we didn't get to bury Mio or Take or the others, either."

He nods thoughtfully. "But what's the point? They're not here."

"Yes, they are," she says. "If they're anywhere, they're with us. I know I've never really let my parents go, and... People don't have funerals for the dead people. They have them so the living people can say goodbye."

"Goodbye?"

"Yeah. You know, final farewells. All the things you wish you'd told them before they died. Everything you wanted them to know. You can remember them, and say it, and let them rest in a place."

He shakes his head; he doesn't want to say any of that aloud. And _goodbye_ has a finality to it that makes something clench in his chest.

Dororo seems to be trying to interpret the look on his face. "It's not like you forget them after that," she says. "More like…you leave them in a place that's safe. Someplace you can visit, even if it's just in your own head, but…they aren't…chained to you anymore."

"Chained?"

"You can't sleep right because you can't let them go. I'm trying to think of a way to help with that. But I'm not good at it either…" She sighs. "Kachan said kids shouldn't have to deal with so much death. We're just unlucky, aniki."

***

Building even a small cairn of black-and-white stones takes the better part of two days, but Dororo does not complain about camping in place, and Hyakkimaru finds the exhausting work numbing to his overstimulated mind. It makes it easier to fall asleep without dreaming; black out into unconsciousness and back without the fleeting, fickle mental touch of a better world.

When the cairn is done, Dororo sits below it, holding a torch aloft in the gathering dark. She says, "Dad," and stops, and her voice is lower and tight, and Hyakkimaru realizes that this is her crying voice. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you. I'm sorry those rotten samurai bastards won against you. But I'm still here. And I'll avenge you if I can.

"And mom…" She stops for a full minute. "You died to feed me. I'm so, so, sorry.

"It should have been me."

Hyakkimaru reaches out to touch her face, soft, and she jerks away from him suddenly, as if ashamed.

"Your turn," she says. Her voice is hard. "Tell them."

He sighs. "Takeo," he starts, because it's somehow easier to start with the children. "Hanako. Nezuko. Tanjirou." There are three children whose names he never knew, and he feels guilty about that even though he couldn't have known; never could have known that Kagemitsu Daigo would do something as terrible as kill children for simply getting in his way. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you." Saying it makes his tongue feel like sand, and not because he's copying Dororo—because the words, while accurate, are not enough. "If I had waited—if I had been there—"

He pauses. He could have died at the temple, with Mio and the children. Dororo might have died, too. The guilt he has is the guilt of the survivor, uncertain of what to do with this life that has been spared by luck or accident, not intention. No god could have designed such a cruel world with intentionality.

"And Mio," he says, so quiet he barely hears himself. He feels Dororo's attention sharpen on him. "It's my fault. All it of it. I—

"I miss the life I could have had with you." A life he can't have. A life that has never been real.

He turns away from the cairn, returns to the fire. Dororo follows him, slowly. He stretches out and pretends to be asleep, and Dororo puts herself behind him, lying back to back so that their shoulders touch and he can feel every indrawn breath. He almost moves, shifts away, but he'd be giving away his wakefulness then, and it feels little like his nicer dreams, so he allows it.

***

That night, he has a dream of the fire. He sees himself, as if from outside, chopping through a man's skull as he screams, and feels nothing: a glorious nothing that is detachment from everything around him. There is a low, warm feeling in the pit of his stomach that encourages him to slice more, faster, with more force, and he does, slicing through faces like meat and hearts like paper, destroying lives he knows nothing about, not bothering to remember faces.

They'd had names. Families. People who would build cairns or pyres and grieve for them. No death is a faceless thing, no matter how justified murder might seem.

From the outside, he realizes that he's a monster. He doesn't deserve to be happy. He had never made anyone happy at all.

He blinks blood out of his eyes and wakes up with Dororo calling his name.

"Hey, aniki!"

"Huh?"

"Uh, you okay? It's just—"

There is something cold and wet behind his eyes.

"You were crying again."

He nods. "I'm a monster. I don't deserve to live." _I don't deserve you. I didn't deserve—_

Dororo slaps him. "Shut up." She yanks him in by the shoulders and talks directly into his ear. "Aniki. You're not a monster. You're the only family I have left." She tightens her hold. "Please don't—hate yourself so much anymore."

He moves her hands, considers her aura, which is darkening around the edges, revealing her emotional pain. He asks, "Do you hate me?"

She shakes her head. "Never. Not for a second."

Hyakkimaru has the stray thought that he shouldn't have gone looking for love in a dream when he has it here.

It doesn't feel like enough, but it feels like a start.

"All right," he says. "I understand."

And he does.


End file.
